Friday, February 29, 2008

One of the key ways that ControlTier's commercial activities directly benefit our Open Source community is via the Solution Libraries maintained at the Moduleforge project.

The experience gained implementing solutions for our commercial customers is made generally available via these libraries, making Moduleforge the means of kick-starting projects by supplementing the base types/modules distributed with the ControlTier framework.

One example of these libraries is "Elements" - a "grab bag" of modules largely concerned with automating the Java server application build and deployment life-cycle with modules covering continuous integration with CruiseControl, builders such as Ant and Maven, application servers such as Tomcat and JBoss, and associated services such as Apache web server and Apache MQ.

There's plenty of work left to extend the scope of Elements to cover a broader set of technologies as well as improve the standard of the solution libraries documentation.

We made a solid step in the right direction this week by releasing notes on using the library to build and deploy Sun's "Duke's Bank" sample application (from their J2EE 1.4 Tutorial) to JBoss 4.0.3SP1, thus providing a clear example to JBoss users of the benefits of using ControlTier.

The plan is to make "Duke's Bank" the primary sample application of a major revision of Elements dubbed the "Java Server Solution Library" that we're preparing ahead of next month's SaasSCon in Santa Clara.

A Maven 2 plugin was created for antdepo, and a Maven archetype was created to support using maven to build a ControlTier Library Jar.

Changes since 3.1-rc1:

bugfix: Change-Dependencies command used by Updaters now correctly allows multiple package files with the same type and version when allowMultiples is true, but the dependency constraints between the deployment and its packages is not exactly specified.

bugfix: a bug preventing Transform creation was fixed.

Installer:

Improve ability to do 'upgrade' installations.

Base types:

Builder repoImport command now supports a 'separator' cli option, allowing the separator between package base and version to be something other than the default of a hyphen character '-'. Also added as an attribute named 'packageSeparator' which can be set with an appropriate Setting subtype. Some typo fixes.

Builder Subversion support improved: scmModule parameter was not being used in some cases.

ProjectBuilder: The meaning of the 'basedir' commmand-line flag was changed to be the top-level directory containing the modules directory.

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

One of the key lines of business for ControlTier is delivering automated provisioning solutions for ATG based e-commerce sites. Over the last three years we've been building up best-practice implementation skills that we've distilled into a freely available integrated solution library.

The release includes detailed documentation on how to build a demonstration code and data provisioning solution based on the Pioneer Cycling sample application running on JBoss, Solid and Linux. This demonstration is a solid starting point for anyone interested reviewing the functionality of our Solution Library; in fact, our consultants build on the Solution Library as the foundation for building custom solutions to meet our clients' site-specific requirements.

Please go ahead and post feedback on the release here or at our main discussion group.